My GM once described severe penalties to my constitution from a disease (I forget which) that my character contracted due to a dive into cold water as "a little cough". No further details, no "You feel like absolute s***", just a little cough. Needless to say, when we had an encounter, my guy is suddenly at very low health and only heals for half the amount he should have.

Yeah, I don't play with that DM anymore. The only good that came of it was that the character was reincarnated as a half-elf and gave me a much-needed boost to dex.

Not really a grand story, but one time my Swordsage got CON poisoning in battle. Multiple instances of it. Enough to instantly bring his HP into the negative hundreds. Causing him to vaporize into nothing.

And that's not all: this happened on literally the first encounter after the GM pulled some serious Deus Ex Machina to bring him back from the dead after he accidentally fell on his sword. He will be forever remembered as the multiverse's most unlucky (and klutzy) Swordsage.

It is nigh unspeakable, the abhorrent thing Drunk Duck did. They... demanded that I register! Also, making my dog drink that fifth of vodka was bad, too. Also, they kept swiping my ER wallet for booze money. Then they borrowed my chrome for a joyride and crashed it. My poor chrome. It was totaled. I had to do a complete uninstall, and run CCleaner to get the registry bits out before I could reinstall it. The damage was that bad.

This is actually a really recent story. I am currently playing in a DnD 3.5 campaign with a rather large party. (There's 8 of us, and half of us have cohorts, and we're toting around like 3 or 4 npcs on top of it.) We have a cleric, a psion, and a dragon shaman, all of whom have access to healing, both for HP and for abilty damage. On top of that, we have some assorted magical healing items and a bard. So we're pretty good for healing.

However, there was an encounter with an intelligent monster that was barely alive, and decidedly nonhostile, who was able to speak common but who was doing everything it could to ignore us. To make a long story short, we had to heal it, but none of the other characters with healing would. Now, I was just an enchantment-specialist wizard (focusing on using power words), but I had Taken Vow of Poverty at level 1, and had so many free exalted feats, that by this point I had Stigmata. So, because nobody else would heal it, I took 4 CON damage in order to.

Then somebody immediately healed it up to full, of course waiting until AFTER I took the CON damage, both meaning I took the damage for no reason, and devaluing the action from a story perspective.

We hadn't used up any of our healing yet that day, so after the bleeding stopped and my CON damage was healable, I was immediately... left with 4 CON damage. Nobody would heal it "because I hadn't brought it up in character while they were there." Despite the fact that "ability damage" isn't really expressable in character, that I HAD brought it up in character while their character was there (but they weren't paying attention OOC), and the fact that I had BLED FROM EVERY PORE OF MY BODY earlier. So I was now even less healthy. (d4 hit dice are harsh.)

Then as we progressed, I ended up getting zapped with 5 INT damage from a failed d% roll on a sort of restricted-magic-area type effect of where we were.

So now I'm sitting there as a Wizard, with 4 CON and 5 INT damage, trying to bring up the fact in character as often as I can despite not being able to actually say "I have ability damage" and with nobody actually curing it.

And THAT'S when we started a dungeon crawl. We fought off about 8 exploding eyeball things (They were scouts or something. The only thing they did in combat was start glowing red on their first turn, and then explode on their next turn, or when they were killed, whichever came first. The explosions did force damage.) and a Large monstrous custom monster of the setting that we'd only encountered once before, and at that point we had beaten it more by preventing it from finishing a certain preparation it has to do to exist at all, this one had done that before we entered the dungeon. We were also fighting those things with only 3 PCs, a cohort, and an NPC, compared to our full roster.

I was still sitting on 4 CON and 5 INT damage (as a wizard) when we encountered the Purple Worm.

A couple of our players showed up at that point so we had 4 PCs 2 Cohorts and an NPC for the fight. Which was good, because I was't able to do much to the Worm. It had too much HP for my power words, I'd lost most of my other memorizations either from the INT damage or from having to use them earlier in the day, and my only damage spell left was powering a reserve feat. So I kind of just stayed out of its way and blasted it with my reserve feat for like 15 damage a round.

It was only AFTER we almost lost our main frontline guy, who ended up expending a hero point and a bunch of his daily abilities to take out the purple worm that the party finally got around to healing my ability damage.

That was the previous two sessions, more or less. Now I'm almost all healed up- I only have 2 INT damage now, and we can go looking for the third room of the dungeon, or we might rest up for 8 hours. Hard to say, I think it depends on which players show up for the session, some of us are decidedly more in need of that rest than others.

One of my favorite characters is a paranoid half-elf sorceress who abuses Arcane Disciple horribly - Divine Power's boost up to full BAB is even nicer when you only had 1/2 to begin with, though it takes a few spells to get the survivability for melee, and some feat wastage to wield a Flaming dwarven waraxe or a Shock spell-boosting katana - flaws are wonderful, and so is Chain Spell, to toss up combat buffs quicker. War, Healing, and Storm make for fun domains. She was like a clericzilla with better magic! Call Lightning, Stoneskin, and Divine Power are my favorite opener. Considered dipping actual Cleric to Divine Metamagic Persist some of the buffs, too.

Stat penalties? Never happened to me personally, but in one campaign, fairly early on, our druid got his CON drained by twelve points by some Shadows. He started at sixteen and ended up with four.

And he never bothered to tell anyone until almost by the end when we happened to run into a competent cleric. He just soldiered on as a frontline fighter with his pitiful health like the badass he was.

I once helped to beta test a system where one's ability scores also counted for one's life points. I think it's been done before, but it's a cool idea that I'm using in a system I'm creating. But the interesting thing was that when you took damage, you temporarily lost that same amount from your skill points. Taking damage, or at least enough damage, could seriously hurt your character. It led to some pretty interesting times.

My FFG 40k characters have a long and illustrious history of taking severe critical damage (and burning almost all of their fate points). Pretty much every one I've ever rolled, no matter the system (Rogue Trader, Dark Heresy, Death Watch, etc.), has been shot in the face by energy weapons and had his Fellowship reduced to 1d10 (in a system where the usual minimum is more like 20-30 and the stat can go as high as 100 or more in certain circumstances). Throw in being blinded and having internal organs destroyed and you have a recipe for crippling penalties.

Fortunately, 40k loves its cybernetics, so as long as my characters had Fate Points to burn and my group was willing to drop some resources, it usually wound up as a net benefit.

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